How do musicians keep the brain young and sharp when heading into old age?
- Researchers find older musicians outperform older non-musicians and equalled young non-musicians in identifying speech in noisy environments
- Study leaders say China’s ageing society may benefit from interventions that can slow cognitive decline
Long-term musical training can keep the brain sharp and young, according to a new study led by Chinese researchers.
The findings provide new insights into how lifelong musical training leads to “successful ageing”, according to the authors.
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“China has entered an ageing society. Ageing causes multiple cognitive declines, which are due to changes in brain function and structure,” said Du Yi, the study’s corresponding author and a researcher at the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
“If we have better interventions that can effectively slow down the ageing process, the older adults can better adapt and we can achieve successful ageing,” she said.
Du and her colleagues previously wrote in a 2016 Nature Communications paper about their discovery that older adults have a reduced ability to understand speech in noisy environments. But they may use the brain’s functional compensation mechanism, which recruits higher cognitive function regions – such as sensorimotor regions – to compensate and help them better understand.
In another study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2017, they found that musical training could help young musicians better process speech in noisy environments through enhanced compensation by sensorimotor integration functions. Sensorimotor integration refers to the process in which the nervous system coordinates sensory information and motor activity.
“We want to figure out if musical training may also improve functional compensation for older musicians, and thus enhance their understanding,” Du said.